Women's Rights: Why Not?

OTHER VIEWS

June 19, 2002|By Nicholas D. Kristof, N.Y. Times

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- We now have a window into what President Bush and America's senators think of the world's women: Not much.

An international women's treaty banning discrimination has been ratified by 169 countries so far (without emasculating men in any of them!), yet it has languished in the United States Senate ever since President Jimmy Carter sent it there for ratification in 1980. This month, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee got around to holding hearings on it, but the Bush administration, after shyly supporting it at first, now is finding its courage faltering.

The support came from Colin Powell's State Department, but then John Ashcroft's Justice Department found out about the treaty -- and seems to be trying to defend America from the terrifying threat of global women's rights. You'd think he might have other distractions, like fixing the FBI, but the Justice Department is conducting its own review of the treaty in what looks suspiciously like an effort to eviscerate it.

I wish Ashcroft could come here to Pakistan, to talk to women like Zainab Noor. Because, frankly, the treaty has almost nothing to do with American women, who already enjoy the rights the treaty supports -- opportunities to run for political office, to receive an education, to choose one's own spouse, to hold jobs. Instead it has everything to do with the half of the globe where to be female is to be persecuted until, often, death.

Noor, a pretty woman with soft eyes and a gold nose ring, grew up in the Pakistani countryside, and like her three sisters she never received a day's education. At the age of 15 she was married off by her parents, becoming the second wife of the imam of a local mosque. He beat her relentlessly.

"He would grab my hair, throw me on the floor and beat me with sticks," she recalled. Finally she ran away.

Her husband found her, tied her to the bed, wired a metal rod to a 220-volt electrical outlet and forced it into her vagina. Surgeons managed to save her life, but horrific internal burns forced them to remove her bladder, urethra, vagina and rectum. Her doctor says she will have to carry external colostomy and urine bags for the rest of her life.

At least she survived. Each year about one million girls in the third world die because of mistreatment and discrimination.

In societies where males and females have relatively equal access to food and health care, and where there is no sex-selective abortion, females live longer and there are about 104 females for every 100 males. In contrast, Pakistan has only 94 females for every 100 males, pointing to three million to seven million missing females in that country alone. Perhaps 10 percent of Pakistani girls and women die because of gender discrimination.

In most cases it is not that parents deliberately kill their daughters. Rather, people skimp on spending on females -- just like Sedanshah, a man at an Afghan refugee camp I visited near here. When his wife and son were both sick, he bought medicine for the boy alone, saying of his wife, "She's always sick, so it's not worth buying medicine for her."

At Capital Hospital here in Islamabad, a nurse named Rukhsana Kausar recalled fraternal-twin babies she had treated recently. At birth, the girl twin weighed one pound one ounce more than the boy. At seven months, their position was reversed: the boy weighed one pound 13 ounces more than his sister.

Critics have complained that the treaty, in the words of Jesse Helms, was "negotiated by radical feminists with the intent of enshrining their radical anti-family agenda into international law" and is "a vehicle for imposing abortion on countries that still protect the rights of the unborn."

That's absurd.

Twenty years of experience with the treaty in the great majority of countries shows that it simply helps Third World women gain their barest human rights.

In Pakistan, for example, women who become pregnant after being raped are often prosecuted for adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. But this treaty has helped them escape execution.

How can we be against that? Do we really want to side with the Taliban mullahs, who, like Ashcroft, fretted that the treaty imposes sexual equality? Or do we dare side with third-world girls who die because of their gender, more than 2,000 of them today alone?